Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
Self-congratulatory inactivist "radicals" promulgating Dem-Repug equivalency theses from the left of this secular democratic socialist feminist queer in the Moot because they don't have the patience or discipline for the heart-breaking slow-paced path of reform via activism and policy in the context of partisan stakeholder politics don't impress me.
As it happens, there are a diversity of stakeholders in the world -- including assholes, including incredibly rich greedheads, including incredibly organized reactionaries, including incredibly stupid mobs of scared dimwits. Do you just believe in incarcerating them, or putting them up against the wall, pretending they don't exist? Politics accommodates, compromises, reforms in the face of diversity. Politics isn't ethics or aesthetics, where you can afford to pretend it's my way or the highway from your La-Z-Boy.
Also, talk is cheap. If they have actually joined a revolutionary cell (basement book clubs don't count) because they truly find the Dems too hopelessly reactionary, then they have earned their big dramatic declarations, at least their asses are on the line. I happen to disagree that such a path will get the world closer to where such revolutionaries want it to be, but I admire those whose convictions cash out in substance.
That's what I mean when I demand they back up their big dismissive disempowering diversionary talk. I am not requesting endless rehearsals of the Big Picture of actually-existing plutocracy in America. I get the Big Picture. Almost every political post I publish to this blog is premised on awareness of this Big Picture. I teach several variations of this Big Picture to college students by the thousands.
Getting from here to there without becoming totally demoralized in the process is what is under discussion. Capitulationists who think declaring "a plague on both your houses!" and thereby enabling Republican white-racist patriarchal plutocratic christianist greedhead victories constitutes a form of holier-than-thou activism (Americans are so spoiled they are forever declaring their passive consumptions to be profoundly active productions) don't impress me much.
But they do inspire a well-earned well-aimed measure of disgust.
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3 comments:
summary: GET OFF YOUR ASSES!
Less talky more walky people!
m-
Dale, you get accused of being negative a lot, but on some things, you're a real Mr. Positive. For example, you really seem to believe in the ability of representative democracy to equalize wealth across socioeconomic classes. Pardon me, but a century's worth of evidence here and in Europe indicates otherwise. And it's no wonder, since representative democracy was really never meant to do such a thing in the first place.
But since you basically agree that the gaps are there, and they're getting wider (even with Obama in the White House) I don't really have much more to say about it.
Except to say, I'll wind up voting for Obama again. But I'll really have to hold my nose when I do. Sorry.
Michael Harrington spoke for me when he said, "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible."
I haven't voted for President without holding my nose a single time in my whole voting life since the mid 80s. I cried with relief when Obama beat McCain, but that doesn't mean I expected Obama to run to the left of his campaign and a President would have to sound and act like Bernie Sanders -- that is to say, far to Obama's left -- before I could vote for her without holding my nose.
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